Welcoming the Stranger

Welcoming the Stranger

The centrality of hospitality to the social practices of many
societies attests to its almost universal importance. Necessary
to human well-being, hospitality offers protection, provision,
and respect to strangers while it also sustains fundamental moral
bonds among family, friends, and acquaintances. In the first
centuries of the church, Christians gave hospitality to strangers
a distinctive emphasis by pressing welcome outward toward the
weakest and those least likely to be able to reciprocate. What
can a closer look at this practice of hospitality teach us about
the moral life more generally?

For Christians, the moral life is inseparable from grace. It
begins in worship as we recognize God's generosity toward us. Our
morality involves responsibility and faithful performance of
duty, but fundamentally it emerges from a grateful heart. We can
see this clearly in hospitality, which is first a response of
love and gratitude for God's love and welcome to us. If not
shaped by gratitude, when we encounter difficult demands or
ungrateful guests, our hospitality quickly becomes grudging.
Grudging hospitality exhausts hosts and wounds guests even as it
serves them.

Christian hospitality reflects and participates in God's
hospitality. God loves the sojourner and provides for the
vulnerable. God gives the lonely a home and offers us a place at
an abundant table. Hospitality depends on a disposition of love;
it has more to do with the resources of a generous and grateful
heart than with availability of food or space.

Hospitality also reminds us that our moral life is inseparable
from close attention to the life of Jesus. In the gospels, Jesus
is present as gracious host and needy guest. He welcomes the
outcast and depends on the welcome of ordinary folk. In his table
fellowship, he challenges cultural assumptions about who is
welcome in the community and in the kingdom. Jesus identifies
himself with the stranger and sick such that ministry to them is
ministry to him (Matthew 25:31-46). Jesus teaches explicitly that
we are to include the poor and infirm (those who seem least
likely to reciprocate) in our invitations to dinner (Luke
14:12-14). We know what hospitality should look like when we
dwell in and on the life of Jesus.

We learn also that moral actions must be embedded in a larger
tradition. Our moral life is not best understood as a series of
individual decisions or as the product of unrelated virtues. It
makes sense only in a larger narrative that makes sense of our
entire lives. The practice of hospitality is nurtured by
attention to its rich and complex place in the Christian
tradition. Stories and injunctions from scripture and the wisdom
and struggles of practitioners through the ages provide the
context within which our hospitable responses are formed.

FOR MUCH OF OUR HISTORY, Christians addressed concerns about
recognition and human dignity within their discussions and
practices of hospitality. Especially in relation to strangers,
hospitality was a basic category for dealing with the importance
of transcending social differences and breaking social boundaries
that excluded certain kinds of persons. Hospitality provided a
context for recognizing the worth of persons who seemed to have
little to offer when assessed by worldly standards. This rich
moral tradition can help to shape a theological framework for
contemporary concerns about inclusion and difference.

But locating ourselves and our practices within the historic
tradition is not enoughthe moral life depends on a
community that embodies its deepest commitments. To do
hospitality well, we need models for whom it is part of a way of
life. We must learn from those who have found ways to practice
hospitality within the distinct tensions and arrangements of
contemporary society. We also need a community with whom to share
the demands and burdens of welcoming strangers.

As we practice hospitality to strangers and reflect on its
place in the Christian tradition, additional insights into the
moral life become available. To sustain countercultural
practices, we must understand our efforts as small pieces of
God's larger work. The ability to continue to welcome strangers
in the midst of an unjust world comes from putting our efforts
into the larger context of God's ongoing work of justice and
healing.

Hospitality reminds us that justice and friendship belong
together. For the Christian, concerns about justice can never be
abstract and disembodied. Our efforts must be grounded in the
wisdom that comes from living alongside those whose lives have
been overlooked or undervalued by the larger society.

Finally, hospitality helps us see that moral practices are
shaped over a lifetime. We learn the skills of hospitality in
small increments of daily faithfulness. The moral life is much
less about dramatic gestures than it is about steady
workfaithfulness undergirded by prayer and sustained by
grace. The surprise is how often it is accompanied by mystery,
blessing, and joy.

Christine Pohl, author of Making Room: Recovering
Hospitality as a Christian Tradition(Eerdmans, August
1999), was professor of Christian social ethics at Asbury
Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, when this article
appeared.